That likes seemed to cure likes was noted in the earliest times, but that similia is the law of cure is not generally accepted, even now in spite of an ever increasing evidence in its favour. It seems that truth can only become truly active through conviction.
Science has greatly broadened the scope of Homeopathy so that it does more things now than formerly, but it does them no better. It was Hahnemann himself who predicted the successful treatment of cholera as well as demonstrated that of typhoid fevers. A little later Homeopathy triumphed decisively over every other method, including no treatment, in pneumonia, in the Vienna Clinic. Still later it surprised and confounded its adversaries by the record it made in yellow fever, while recently we have all seen how surprisingly efficient it can be in influenza. It is a proud and convincing record.
We might recite victory after victory over acute diseases, epidemics and opposition only to finally realise that every day medicine remains firmly wedded to strongly materialistic ideas and that sanitation is gradually showing us how much better prevention is than even the best of cures. At the other extreme surgery is removing one after another of the end products of disease, so that at last we are left to choose whether it be better to rely upon the unfettered recuperative powers of nature, upon surgical relief or upon the stabilising power of dynamic drug action, without which there can be no real Homeopathy.
The Homeopathist knows that the governing life principle but seldom reacts directly and specifically to strong measures, but will respond quickly and effectively to a similar or more or less synchronously acting force. It may be well to remember here that the calming down of disturbed vital action is a daily task that can not always wait upon the decisions of the microscope or the knife.
To my mind there is necessarily a close relation between things able to excite and other things capable of calming down similar vital disturbances. Reaction, whether to drugs or disease is clearly of a kind; it not only discloses susceptibility, but its speed is governed by its adaptability, the amount and convertibility of vital energy present and the obstacles to be overcome. Viewed in this light there is certain to be a vast difference between recovery and cure, while susceptibility is finally resolved into one of the great miasms.
When the life forces vibrate in an unusual way, symptoms which we may finally call disease, appear; they serve as indices for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, as the case may be. The coarser ones are of more diagnostic and the finer ones of therapeutic import. That they unfold gradually should argue strongly against a hasty prescription.
The mind which is trained to sense material things only takes to the giving of strong drugs like a duck takes to water. For it the supersensible world is a void, that absurdity of physics; it is not fitted to comprehend such ideas. This is the real reason why the dynamized potency looks absurd and impractical and its seeming effects are viewed with suspicion. Such ideas are viewed with a feeling akin to that which caused the burning of witches and the flogging out of sins, only we hate to admit that many of us are still bound hand and foot by such bigotry, narrow-mindedness and conceit. Because we can’t rapidly see the other side we would fain make ourselves believe there is no such thing.
I take it that many of you have come here with an open mind; not quite satisfied with your former results you are looking for better things and perchance Homeopathy looks worth while. If this is your idea, let me beg of you to remember that all things contain only what we patiently work out of them, and Homoeopathy is no exception.
All true science is really grounded in philosophy, and the only therapeutic guide which has stood the fire test of painstaking investigation is the natural law of similia, whose various aspects, ramifications and philosophy, dovetail most intimately with most of the sciences, in itself a fact of momentous import. It must be mastered from this point of view, which will then soon show how little it encourages the idea that the adaptabilities of millenniums of years can be lightly set aside by the brainracking concoctions of the modern therapeutic laboratory.
Nothing happens without an adequate cause and successful remedial measures carry their own evidence of correctness. The use of simples as well as the selection of curative herbs by animals most assuredly arises from impulses, themselves born of the prompting of and the involuntary obedience to this same law. In the nature of things it can not be, nor is it otherwise.